A 'party drug' just crossed a major hurdle on the path to being legally prescribed as medicine

London-based psychiatrist Ben Sessa sometimes feels like a doctor
at a nursing home.

"Psychiatry is a desperate place to live sometimes; it feels like
a palliative care industry," Sessa said at a conference in London
this July on the science of psychedelics. "We've almost given up
hope that we can actually cure [many of our patients] and turn it
around."

One of those drugs is MDMA, or ecstasy. The group leading the
charge to get MDMA approved for medical use passed a major
hurdle after the US Food and Drug Administration granted it a
special designation that could fast-track its approval to treat
PTSD.

Breakthrough therapy

The group behind the new research is the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit
organization that is leading much of the research into
psychedelics and mental illness in the US. MAPS' founder, Rick
Doblin, said at the London conference that he believed MDMA was
the "most likely" psychedelic to be adopted by psychiatric and
psychotherapy professionals.

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"MDMA is the most gentle of all the psychedelics," Doblin said.

Part of the premise of granting a treatment "breakthrough
therapy" designation involves recognizing that it could have a
meaningful advantage over existing treatments. As of August 27,
MDMA has been granted this designation, meaning that it moves
toward the final phase of medical trials that could one day lead
to possible prescription use of the drug to treat PTSD.

Psychedelic-based treatments "offer an opportunity to dig down
and get to the heart of the problems that drive long term mental
illness in a much more effective way than our current model,
which is take daily medications to mask the symptoms and stay
just-about level without digging down," Sessa said.

Clark Martin, a cancer patient who participated in a medical
trial of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms)
for depression, said his experience was overwhelmingly positive.
"With the psilocybin, you get an appreciation — it's out of time
— of well-being, of simply being alive and a witness to life and
to everything and to the mystery itself,"
Martin told Business Insider in January.

Together, the two treatments could help produce faster and more
measurable results, according to people involved in the research.

"Psychotherapy is painful, it's slow, it's fits and starts, you
start to get to something important and then the patient
disappears for a month at a time; they're very defended about
getting down to it," said New York-based psychiatrist Julie Holland at the London
conference. Holland is also the
medical monitor for the MAPS study of MDMA
for PTSD in veterans.

"MDMA-assisted psychotherapy allows the patient to be more sort
of open to the process. It is a less painful process; MDMA can
act as a catalyst to make the therapy go faster, be more
efficient, be deeper, get to that malignant thing that needs to
be taken out and examined in a more sort of peaceful environment
with more acceptance," Holland said.

Researchers are hopeful that the new FDA designation will help
them in their quest to provide relief to people who haven't
benefited from traditional approaches.